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6600GT Performance is crappy...Help!

R

royhobbs

Junior Member
I just bought an AGP MSI 6600GT Refurbished from Newegg. It was a great deal at $157 shipped but I'm afraid it's got issues. I started up counterstrike and the performance was horrible.

I am upgrading from a Geforce 4 420 MX, and I can play CS really ok with that card minus quality settings. So I checked the settings and it was still 1024 x 768 but all extra settings were turned up to high. This was the *Recommended settings for my card, so it autoed. I turned them back down and my performance was ok, similar to my GF 4 420 card.

So I ran 3dMark05 and I have two results, with different drivers, because I have tried the last three NVidia drivers so far.

Here is the results: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=738499

First score was 1034, second score was 727. Seems horrible, 1 frame per second most of the time, this can't be right.

Anybody have any thoughts? I think I'm going to have to send it back, but I could have missed something. Thanks for any help.
 
Yeah, re-load DX9c, and upgrade your drivers. Either go with the "safe bet" in NVIDIA's 71.84 WHQL, or, of you're feeling up to it, get XTreme-G's 76.41's. I can personally vouch for them, and they're great. You aren't gonna get 5000 marks, but you should sure as hell get more than 1000.
 
Thank you guys for the quick responses. Very helpful! I have discovered something that may be the cause. I am missing the driver for the SM Bus Controller. This showed up when I threw in the new video card, and I totally forgot about it because it couldn't find a driver. I'm guessing this is a System Manager Bus or something? Probably important.

Do you guys think this could be causing my problem? I can't seem to find a driver for it. I have my motherboard CD but don't see anything called an SM Bus Controller on it. Also, why would it have done this when I swapped out cards? I don't seem to recall having this problem before the card.

Thanks again for the replies.
 
The SM bus controller is part of the motherboard chipset patch. Without that patch installed, your scores will be horrible. You need to find out what chipset is on your motherboard....Intel, VIA, Nvidia??

Whichever one you have, download the latest and install it, then install the 71.84 nvidia drivers for video and you should be good 😉


Edit: Nevermind, i just saw your motherboard, you have the Nforce chipset, so you need to download this and install it:

Nvidia Nforce Driver 5.10 for XP

Good luck!!
 
OK, thanks for the replies. I reinstalled chipset drivers, definitely the problem. Got a 3206 in 3dmark05. Much better framerates in games, etc.

However, three or four times my machine has shutdown in the middle of a benchmark or game. I'm wondering if my power supply can't handle the video card or something.

Anybody have this happen before? Thanks again.
 
OK, here's an update. I had three or four shutdowns, so I re-arranged what power plugs were connected to which devices. I had the video card plugged into a fan and the hard drive, so I switched it around a little, now I have the hard drive, and two cd-rom drives on one split, and the video card, and two fans on the other split.

So far I have not had a shutdown, but my power supply is 420 W with 15A on the 12V. It may be that my power supply is not good enough from what i've been told, but since I took the hard drive and video card off of the same one it seems to be ok. Would the hard drive be pulling a lot more juice than a couple of fans?

I also flashed the BIOs to enable temperature monitoring. Using RivaTuner I have been monitoring the temp. It always idles at about 55-56 C. This seems pretty high to me, however, it has never gone above 78 at full load during a game or benchmark. I am trying to make sure the card works before even thinking about overclocking it. I'm not sure what to use to push the temperature the highest for a test, at stock speeds that is, i've been using 3dmark, cs:s, and some other stuff.

I think that they clamped the HSF unit on a little better than normal after it was returned, because there's a clamp on the back side of the card that i don't believe is normally there.

I've got a few more days to test this before my Newegg warranty runs out so I'm trying to make sure the card works good.

Any more thoughts would be great.

Thanks.
 
Originally posted by: royhobbs
OK, here's an update. I had three or four shutdowns, so I re-arranged what power plugs were connected to which devices. I had the video card plugged into a fan and the hard drive, so I switched it around a little, now I have the hard drive, and two cd-rom drives on one split, and the video card, and two fans on the other split.

So far I have not had a shutdown, but my power supply is 420 W with 15A on the 12V. It may be that my power supply is not good enough from what i've been told, but since I took the hard drive and video card off of the same one it seems to be ok. Would the hard drive be pulling a lot more juice than a couple of fans?

I also flashed the BIOs to enable temperature monitoring. Using RivaTuner I have been monitoring the temp. It always idles at about 55-56 C. This seems pretty high to me, however, it has never gone above 78 at full load during a game or benchmark. I am trying to make sure the card works before even thinking about overclocking it. I'm not sure what to use to push the temperature the highest for a test, at stock speeds that is, i've been using 3dmark, cs:s, and some other stuff.

I think that they clamped the HSF unit on a little better than normal after it was returned, because there's a clamp on the back side of the card that i don't believe is normally there.

I've got a few more days to test this before my Newegg warranty runs out so I'm trying to make sure the card works good.

Any more thoughts would be great.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Just so you know, 15A on the 12V+ rail is low. For example, I have an Enermax 430W with 33A on the 12V+rail. It might be more than enough, but better over than under.

 
Wow, 33A is >>>> much more than 15A. I wasn't aware they had so much range on these. If I keep getting the shutdown problem its good to know there's so much available in terms of Amps. I just wish I could narrow it down to either the card or the power supply. I mean I am pretty sure it would have been the lack of power, but good to know for sure. Thanks.
 
I think a 3.5" HD can use up to 30W on startup, whereas a case fan will use maybe 2W. So it's definitely better to keep the video card and HD on separate lines, though they may ultimately go back to the same rail. The fact that shutdowns have gone away when you removed the HD from the GPU daisy chain seems to indicate it's a power issue.

If you have a no-name PSU, you might want to just upgrade to a quality, name-brand one. You can always carry it over to your next upgrade, and your system gets more and reliable power now.
 
So far I have had no problems since I switched the power from the hard drive and video card to the fans and video card. It all seems to be running pretty smooth, no power outages, etc. Half Life 2 did get the temperature up to 82 degrees, but that is the max so far.

3200 in 3dmark and great framerates in my games. I appreciate everyone's input on this thread, it has helped me a ton. Now that I can play CS:S at 1600x1200 with high settings, time to OC this baby!!!???

Peace out!
 
Your temps are normal for 6 series cards. I have a 6600gt with idle in the high 50's and loads in mid 70's, but I've seen many others with loads in the 80's and even above.

With regard to the PSU, I have a 360W Chieftec with 17a on the 12v rail and never had any problems.
 
IIRC it is recommended by nv to have at least 18A on +12v, but if it works fine, well then no problem i guess.
 
I have an evga 6600GT AGP and it ran pretty warm too. It idled at about 53 and load was 78. I bought and installed the Logisys CF206 cooler and idle is now 43 with load at 53. The improvement was amazing. Well, I am using AS3 instead of the white goop which helps too, but that cooler makes a huge difference. I got mine from SVC, but Directron carries it too.




 
Yeah, really, there isn't a need to be worrying about the temps of your 6 series cards. nVidia has the shutdown temp at 120*C. While it's getting somewhat hot, it's nothing to really be concerned about until it starts hitting 90*C or above under full load, in my book at least.
 
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